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“He was there to promote me as the right person for the lieutenant governor job. Instead, he made me feel uneasy, gross, and confused.” Lucy Flores (left), the former Democratic nominee for Nevada lieutenant governor, wrote. | Ethan Miller/Getty Images

Former Nevada lawmaker accuses Biden of inappropriate kiss

Lucy Flores, the former Democratic nominee for Nevada lieutenant governor, on Friday accused former Vice President Joe Biden of what she described as an inappropriate encounter when he campaigned for her in 2014.

Writing in “The Cut,” Flores said she was standing at the side of the stage at a campaign rally when she felt Biden approach her from behind and lean in to smell her hair.

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“He proceeded to plant a big slow kiss on the back of my head,” Flores wrote. “My brain couldn’t process what was happening. I was embarrassed. I was shocked. I was confused.”

“I couldn’t move and I couldn’t say anything. I wanted nothing more than to get Biden away from me,” she added. “My name was called and I was never happier to get on stage in front of an audience.”

It’s unclear what sort of impact the accusation will have on Biden’s decision on whether to join the 2020 presidential field.

Biden has long had a reputation for overly familiar physical contact with women — most notably when he massaged the shoulders of new Defense Secretary Ash Carter’s wife in 2015 and during swearing-in ceremonies for senators and their families.

But Biden’s behavior is now getting more attention in the #MeToo era, and Flores’ accusation could further heighten the scrutiny as the former vice president considers a 2020 presidential bid.

“Vice President Biden was pleased to support Lucy Flores’s candidacy for lieutenant governor of Nevada in 2014 and to speak on her behalf at a well-attended public event. Neither then, nor in the years since, did he or the staff with him at the time have an inkling that Ms. Flores had been at any time uncomfortable, nor do they recall what she describes,” said Bill Russo, a spokesperson for Biden. “But Vice President Biden believes that Ms. Flores has every right to share her own recollection and reflections, and that it is a change for better in our society that she has the opportunity to do so. He respects Ms. Flores as a strong and independent voice in our politics and wishes her only the best. Flores, who served as a Nevada assemblywoman from 2010 to 2014, wrote that seeing photos of Biden “getting uncomfortably close with women and young girls” over the course of his vice presidency showed an ignorance of “the power imbalance that exists between Biden and the women he chooses to get cozy with.”

“Biden was the second-most powerful man in the country and, arguably, one of the most powerful men in the world,” Flores wrote. “He was there to promote me as the right person for the lieutenant governor job. Instead, he made me feel uneasy, gross, and confused.”

For months Biden has been mulling a presidential run, a decision he’s said he’s “very close” to making, possibly as soon as early April.

Flores wrote that news of Biden’s potential candidacy “without much talk about his troubling past as it relates to women” spurred her to write about her encounter with the former vice president five years prior.

“I’m not suggesting that Biden broke any laws, but the transgressions that society deems minor (or doesn’t even see as transgressions) often feel considerable to the person on the receiving end,” she wrote. “That imbalance of power and attention is the whole point — and the whole problem.”